Ava Swevels received the 11th Dow Best OML Master Thesis Award 2023
On the 19th of October, 2023, Ava Swevels received the Dow Best OML Master Thesis Award 2023. The jury unanimously decided to grant the 11th edition of this award to Ava. The award is accompanied by a check of 1,000 Euros. This yearly award is handed over by a representative of Dow at the Operations Management & Logistics Diploma Ceremony, in the Fall of this year by Leo Baeten (ISC Director Industrial Intermediates & Infrastructure).
In the thesis, titled “Creating a Digital Shadow of a Manufacturing Process with Inferred Missing Information using an Event Knowledge Graph”, Ava provides an excellent combination of emerging technology with real industrial application. Ava uses a highly promising modeling language as a point of departure for creating a digital shadow, namely an event knowledge graph. She extends it with the clearly delineated contribution of an inference engine, a way to include missing data. What is particularly appreciated is that, in executing her research, Ava never lost sight of balancing the practical and the academic. For one this expresses itself in the fact that her data model builds on a healthy mix of academic and practical requirements. Digital shadows for one manufacturing process seem expandable to factories and supply chains. This is clearly beneficial to not only her partner company, but can be used by others seeking better understanding of their processes. The result is a practically valuable thesis, that at the same time has notable academic merit. Noteworthy is that the academic merit manifests itself in a publication in the main track of the internationally well renowned, and highly selective, 2023 Business Process Management conference. On top of the great content of the research the thesis was well written
About the DOW-awards
The jury consisted of Aram de Ruiter and Kyle Harshbarger from Dow, and Sybren de Kinderen and Alp Akcay from Eindhoven University of Technology. Marco Slikker served as non-voting jury chair. The jury judged the theses on their academic contribution and industrial impact. The students that graduated in the past academic year and received at least a grade of 9 for their projects and theses have been nominated for the award. Fifteen students satisfied this criterium. The jury is happy with the quality, and concluded that all reflected the objectives of the Operations Management & Logistics program very well, i.e., to use formal models to analyze, improve, and redesign operational processes.